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Book Review: 'Bicycle Design: An Illustrated History' by Tony Hadland and Hans-Erhard Lessing

The bicycle has changed a lot over a hundred years—or has it?

By

Michael Shermer

Updated July 4, 2014 11:05 p.m. ET

Path dependency is an economic concept intended to describe what happens when a technology becomes stuck in a particular pattern out of historical momentum rather than superior design. The "qwerty" keyboard is the most popular example of the phenomenon. As the standard narrative has it, qwerty got a head start in the late 19th century over other typewriter-keyboard arrangements that were vastly superior, and so now we are stuck with an unwieldy and inferior system.